City by city, it's growing. If you have been watching the rise of Occupy
Wall Street from the sidelines, maybe it's because you're not sure if you're
part of the "99 percent" or maybe it's because you just have other things to
do. Here's the thing: This is bigger than one person, one issue, or one
movement.Here are five reasons why environmental activists and animal
rights activists should Occupy Wall Street:

1) Corporations are destroying the planet. And, as
Bill McKibben wrote, "For too
long, Wall Street has been occupying the offices of our government, and the
cloakrooms of our legislatures." The first official
Declaration of the Occupation of New York City articulated some of the
many facets of this movement, including environmental and animal rights
concerns. Here are a few highlights:

"As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass
injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so
that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can
know that we are your allies..

They have poisoned the food supply through
negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of
countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices--

They
continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil--

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping,
and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit--"

2) Corporations are attacking you. Since the 1980s, corporations have
campaigned to label activists as "eco-terrorists." They have pushed for
outrageous prison sentences of activists like Tim DeChristopher. They have
lobbied for federal legislation like the
Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act and state legislation to label civil
disobedience as "eco-terrorism." They are doing everything in their power to
marginalize and disrupt the environmental and animal rights movements. (In
other words, as this clever
Greenpeace video depicts, they're afraid of you.) Rather than protesting
bill by bill, arrest by arrest, this is an opportunity to challenge the true
problem: unchecked corporate power.

3) You have experiences to share about tactics. Occupy Wall Street
has locked arms to
blockade the banks, and
marched to the mansions of millionaires. Sound familiar? More than 800
environmentalists were
arrested in a massive civil disobedience against the XL Pipeline. And
the SHAC campaign
brought a multinational corporation near bankruptcy through a diversity of
tactics including home demonstrations. This obviously isn't to say that
environmentalists and animal rights activists created tactics like civil
disobedience or home demonstrations, but they have, more than any other
contemporary social movement, put them to unique and effective use targeting
corporations. There are lessons to be shared-- good, bad, and ugly-- that will
benefit everyone.

4) You have experiences to share about dealing with corporate and
government repression. Occupy Wall Street has already seen some of the overt
tactics used to target social movements, such as the police beating and
pepper-spraying activists. As this movement grows, however, so will the
proportionate backlash. You have experiences with informants, infiltrators,
and corporate espionage. You have resisted grand jury witch hunts and fought
back against restraining orders and injunctions. You have defeated draconian
state legislation and organized effective prisoner support campaigns. To be
clear, ya'll aren't alone! Other social movements have dealt with, are
dealing with, this as well. But the backlash against the animal rights and
environmental movements, the
"Green Scare,"
is a case study in all the post 9/11 tools available to corporations and
those who represent them. I've sounded like a broken record on this website,
but I'll say it again. There's nothing inevitable about any of this. By
coming together and sharing experiences, we can coordinate and fight back.

5) This is bigger than all of us. By "this" I don't mean Occupy Wall
Street (although that's part of it). I mean the task at hand. We all, out of
necessity, focus on the issues that are most dear to us. We have limited
time, limited money, limited resources. That's why, for instance, I have
carved out the field of work that I have. But listen: there are times for
carving out our niches, and times for doing the hard work, the messy and
uncomfortable and frustrating work, of trying to connect all of the pieces.
Animal rights activists and environmentalists are often pegged by the
broader, capital-L "Left" as "single issue," but I have never found that to
be true. This is an opportunity for all of us to share, as the Zapatista
saying goes, "One no, many yeses."

Slavoj Zizek captured this sentiment beautifully in an address to Occupy
Wall Street:

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German
worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors,
he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from
me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink,
it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in
blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant,
apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the
West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair -- the only thing
unavailable is red ink." And is this not our situation till now? We have all
the freedoms one wants -- the only thing missing is the red ink: we feel free
because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this
lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate
the present conflict -- 'war on terror,' 'democracy and freedom,' 'human
rights,' etc -- are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the situation
instead of allowing us to think it.You, here, you are giving to all of
us red ink.

Want to take action? Start at the
Occupy Wall Street main website. What are you planning in your city?